SOURCE: "Healing Songs: Secular Music in the Short Fiction of Rudolph Fisher," in CLA Journal, Vol. 26, No. 2, December 1982, pp. 191-203.

In the following essay, McCluskey argues that Fisher transplants folk vernacular, through music, to the urban setting, and incorporates it into his stories where it serves as both a framing device and a refrain.

In the preface to the first edition of the Book of American Negro Poetry, published in 1921, James W. Johnson insisted that the black American poet find a form "that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than symbols from without, such as the mere mutilation of English spelling and pronunciation." Johnson proceeded to relate the stifling effects which the minstrel and Plantation School traditions had on the use of dialect. Perhaps a time would come when attitudes toward the use of dialect would mature, but that time, at least to Johnson's...